Last year after I had OpenHAB up and running and had gotten comfortable with some basics one of my first goals was to get control ((in time for the holidays) over the cheap LED rgb strips that had become so readily available for about $15 for a 16ft roll…only problem was automating with a readily available networked RGB controller (that did not cost as much as Philips HUE).

My first home automation panel was an HAI panel and I had played with some software based automation on top such as Elve, Haiku, Homeseer, etc…when looking for more versatile and custom ways to extend functionality It was suggested I might look into openhab and MQTT, which thank goodness opened up the world to me once I jumped in. Haven’t looked back since! Anyway I digress…

So in the timeliness of the season I would like to centralize the information I had pulled together from various sources in order to get everything together and working as desired. I remember looking for a complete how to for openhab–>MQTT–>arduino–>RGBs, perhaps there are more write ups now but if not here is mine (It was a good learning excercise for me though):

It’s a good idea to test and I like to keep a terminal open subscribed to all

$ mosquitto_sub -h localhost -t \# -v

Assemble Arduino shields and upload the sample Velleman code to check operation. I will post my Arduino code below which contains some simple MQTT triggers and code to display any color selected by the color picker item in openhab. Modify as necessary for your application.

I know it's a pretty basic control right now just sending the color wheel selection to the light, but I would be interested if anyone implements any good code for effects or scripts, etc...this could be a good thread for variations and ideas on this type of lighting

Is it possible to run same coding as above on arduino instead on ESP8266 to get more io's?My coding works great with Ethernet (Arduino Ethernet), but want to use arduino mini with ESP-05 as a "modem" to wifi, but cant find any coding to do so.

Spent most of the evening messing around with it and googling but got nowhere. I do have a few reels of ws2812b but that is a project for another day and I want to use what I have now for the analog strips.